TIANANMEN SQUARE: Inland man a witness to tragic history

Despite warnings not to shoot photographs, Yucaipa resident Rick Clark captured these images of pro-democracy demonstrations in China in June 1989. Clark says the protesters were peaceful, and he was shocked when the Chinese military reacted with deadly force. He says he still wonders what happened to the students he talked to the night before so many died.

A few hours before tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to smother a budding pro-democracy movement, Yucaipa’s Rick Clark was chatting with students who were camped out there.

For 25 years, he has wondered what happened to them. Were some among the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people shot to death or crushed by tanks in and around the square on June 4, 1989?

Clark knew when he walked among the exuberant protesters that he was witnessing a seminal moment in Chinese history. He didn’t know he was among the last foreigners to stand in Tiananmen Square before its name became synonymous with bloodshed.

Clark, 70, was in China with his late wife, Diane, on a two-week guided group tour. They had seen the usual tourist sites: The Great Wall, the pandas at the Beijing Zoo, the Summer Palace.

The couple had been scheduled to explore Tiananmen Square and its surroundings for a few hours in the early evening of June 3, but their time was cut to an hour because of the protests.

Their group’s guide warned Clark and others to not take photos. Clark saw police and military officials grabbing other onlookers’ cameras or ripping the film out of the cameras.

But Clark took photos anyway.

“These are the pictures of the students,” Clark said as he sat on his living room sofa thumbing through photos of groups of young people crowded together on the massive square. “There were thousands of them.”

One photo shows demonstrators gathered around the Monument to the People’s Heroes with banners proclaiming, “Promote democracy” and “No other choice!” in Chinese.

Another picture shows a smiling Clark in front of the “Goddess of Democracy,” a torch-carrying plaster statue that resembled the Statue of Liberty.

SMALL SOUVENIR, BIG SYMBOL

Clark picked up a white button. “Victor” was written in English above a hand with a forefinger and middle finger making a “V” sign. “Beijing souvenir” was written in Chinese. A woman had given it to Clark.

“This is one of my most prized possessions,” Clark said. “If they caught you with this, they would confiscate it. I managed to sneak it out.”

The massacre occurred after seven weeks of protests in Beijing and other Chinese cities called for greater democracy and political freedom. One Tiananmen Square rally drew more than a million people.

The Chinese government had begun instituting economic reforms, and “there was hope at the time that some of the top leaders were sympathetic to the (protesters’) cause,” said Yenna Wu, a UC Riverside comparative-literature professor who has written extensively on human rights and prison camps in China. “There was an opportunity for China to be something quite different and embark on political reform, to go on a path toward democracy.”

But hardliners in the Communist Party leadership ultimately gained the upper hand on how to react to the protests, said Clayton Dube, executive director of USC’s U.S.-China Institute.

“The only reason this lasted for seven weeks is that there was division at the top on how to deal with the students,” he said.

Today, China permits protests against corrupt local officials or pollution, Dube said. But one lesson top officials took away from Tiananmen Square is the need to act harshly and quickly when national leaders’ authority or legitimacy is questioned, or when there is an attempt to fundamentally change the system of government, he said.

The massacre led to widespread disillusionment, said Perry Link, a UCR professor and co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers, internal Chinese government and Communist Party documents that reveal how the decision to crush the protests was made.

“It was a turning point in Chinese history, because after the massacre no one believed at all in socialist ideology (‘serve the people,’ etc.) and the regime needed to find other ways to draw popular support,” Link said in an email from Taiwan. “Money-making and ‘patriotism’ became those other ways, and these have turned the society's public values towards materialism and narrow nationalism.”

Join the conversation

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to allow Freedom Communications, Inc. the right to republish your name and comment in additional Freedom publications without any notification or payment.